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The sitting room of the house with the fire lit.

Seasons

Catania in winter: November is the month

Eighteen degrees at midday, tables still outside, snow on Etna and no queues. The best time to come is the one nobody considers.

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People booking Sicily think of July. That is understandable, and it is also why July in Sicily is expensive, crowded and — in the city — very hot.

Then there is November. And people who come in November tend to come back in November.

The weather, without exaggeration

Catania's November average is around eighteen degrees by day and twelve at night. Which means you sit outside in shirtsleeves at midday and want a jacket by eight in the evening. It rains, yes: November is one of the wettest months of the year, but it rains the way it rains here — hard, for an hour, and then the sun comes back.

December and January are colder and drier. February belongs to Sant'Agata, and that is another story entirely.

What changes from summer

  • You can walk. The centre in August, at one in the afternoon, is an ordeal. In November it is a stroll.
  • You walk into everything. The Benedictine Monastery, the Roman theatre, Castello Ursino: no queues, and the guided tours are small.
  • Etna has snow. From December, the white mountain above the black city is the image Sicily never promises in its summer photographs.
  • Prices fall. Flights, rooms, restaurants: out of season the same holiday costs far less.
  • The Catanesi are in town. In August half the city is at the sea. From November to May the city belongs to the people who live in it, and you feel it in the markets, the bars, the theatres.
The opera season at the Teatro Massimo Bellini runs from January to June. In summer the theatre is closed: the most Catanese thing of all happens in winter.

Sant'Agata, if you come in February

From 3 to 5 February the city stops. It is one of the most attended religious festivals in the world: hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, a procession lasting more than twenty-four hours, the candelore carried on shoulders.

It is magnificent, and it should be said plainly: during those three days Catania cannot be visited in the ordinary way. The central streets are closed, moving around is slow, and rooms are booked many months ahead. If you come for the festival, come for the festival.

The great fountain seen from the terraces of the Bellini Garden.
November from the park: the low light summer never has.

The mornings

The thing that really persuades people is not on the list. It is breakfast: in winter the light comes in low and from another direction, and the terrace — used in the evening in summer, because by day it is unusable — is in November the best place in the house at nine in the morning.

The lit fire, for once, is not a decorative detail.

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